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Google Plus Authorship

I have a website called Website A. I wish to migrate alot of the content from Website A to Website B. Website B will be on a completely different domain name and environment. Authors of Website A will act as contributing authors for Website B. It is also possible that other contributing authors of other websites C and D commit to writing content on Website B.

Questions

(1) Does it make sense to create a google plus profile under UserA@websiteA.com and link from content on websiteB to their google plus profile under UserA@websiteA.com?

(2) Does AuthorRank affect PageRank? If yes, if I take the above approach would websiteA be effected or websiteB since the content writers of websiteA are contributing to websiteB?

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(3) Is it ok for userA to have a corporate google plus profile assuming he might also have another google plus profile under a different address?

I always think it make sense that there exists a google plus profile at an employee level and another google plus profile at a personal level.

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(4) If an employee leaves the company, do I leave his/hers Google Plus profile alive? The fact that no more content would be published under that particular profile, would that negatively effect author rank over time?

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(5) Another interesting observation is that UsaToday, CNN etc do not use authorship? No authors link to their twitter profile or google plus profile. Shouln't they be doing this in terms of author rank or is author rank not that important?

1 Response

(1) Yes. G+ authorship represents real human authors, and it's not only perfectly natural for an author to contribute to multiple sites, it should make that author more credible, as multiple websites "believe in" their expertise and accept their contributions. I also believe that AuthorRank will consider the diversity of authors writing for a given site to be a positive thing.

(2) AuthorRank doesn't really exist yet, according to most experts, FYI. But I don't know if you can find anyone who'd predict that it WON'T make it into the algorithm soon. PageRank is a completely separate factor & algo. The Google ranking algorithm is a combination of many factors, of which PageRank is one, AuthorRank will likely be one eventually, Panda is one, Penguin is one, etc.

(3) I think that's OK, however, keep in mind that if the user is very active on a personal level, this social online activity won't benefit his/her corporate profile. If that person is willing to spend a little time every week in BOTH profiles, sharing, commenting, interacting, etc., then I think all is good. On the other hand, a social media profile that never interacts...just publishes...that looks like spam.

(4) I would leave their profile alone, and encourage them to use it wherever they are going forwards. If they continue to be active, build more trust and authority, etc., that can only benefit you.

(5) They should. NY Times does. It might not be affecting them now, with AuthorRank apparently not yet part of the algorithm, but it is expected to. Keep in mind, giant corporations typically have a very hard time making changes, and for a massive industry leader like CNN or USA Today, they've got such strong backlink profiles that there isn't nearly the pressure on them to take advantage of new and upcoming factors like AuthorRank.

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